Silver on the Tree Read online

  “Got at?” said Jane.

  “The Dark,” Barney said. “You remember—the way it makes something wriggle into your mind and say I don’t want you, go away. … Makes you feel something terrible is going to happen.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Oh yes. I do remember.”

  Barney hopped in front of her like some small fierce animal. “Well, if you fight it, it can’t get hold. Push it off, run away from it—” He grabbed her sleeve. “Come on. Race you up the hill!”

  Jane tried to smile. “All right!”

  They rushed up the path to the waiting figures on the hill, raindrops scattering from their coats as they ran. Simon followed, more slowly. He had been listening with only half his attention. The rest had been caught, while Barney spoke, by two sinuous red animals slinking into the bracken from a thicket of gorse; and then out of the gorse, if he had not been imagining it, two bright pairs of eyes, watching them.

  But it seemed a bad moment to mention that to Jane.

  Bran said, as they watched Barney and Jane running towards them up the path. “What was that all about, d’you think?”

  “They could just have been discussing whether it was time for lunch,” Will said.

  Bran pulled his glasses down his nose, and the tawny eyes regarded Will steadily for a moment, between the dark lenses and cap. “Old One,” Bran said softly. “You know better than that.” Then he pushed his glasses back and grinned. “Anyway, it’s too early.”

  But Will looked soberly down at the approaching figures. “The Light needs those three. It always has, in this whole long quest. So the Dark must be watching them very hard, now. We must stay close to them, Bran—specially Barney, perhaps.”

  Barney came panting up to them, his hood flapping on his shoulders and his yellow hair damp-dark with rain. “When’s lunch?” he said.

  Bran laughed. “Cam March Arthur is just over the next slope.”

  “What does it look like?” Without waiting for an answer Barney was gone, trotting up the path, mackintosh flapping.

  Bran turned to go after him. But Jane was in his way. She stood there, breathing unevenly, looking coolly at them both in a way Will did not recognize. “It won’t do, you know,” she said. “We’re all marching along as if everything was ordinary but we just can’t go on pretending to one another.”

  Will looked at her, patience battling urgency in his mind; his head dropped for a moment on to his chest and he let out a short hiss of breath. “All right then. What do you want us to say?”

  “Just something about what we might find, up there,” Jane said, quavering, exasperated. “About what we’re doing here.”

  Bran was on the words like a terrier at a bone, before Will could open his mouth. “Doing? Nothing, girl—you will probably have nothing to do but look at a valley and a lake and say, oh, how pretty. What’s the fuss? If you don’t like the rain, wrap yourself up and go home. Go on!”

  “Bran!” Will said sharply.

  Jane stood very still, eyes wide.

  Bran said angrily, “The hell with it! If you have seen the raising of fear, and the killing of love, and the Dark creeping in over all things, you do not ask stupid questions. You do what you are intended to do, and no nonsense. And so that is what we should all be doing now, going on to where we might perhaps find out the next right move.”

  “And no nonsense!” said Jane tightly.

  Simon came up behind her, silent, listening, but she paid no attention.

  “Right!” Bran snapped.

  Watching Jane, Will felt suddenly that he was seeing someone he had never met before. Her face was drawn into furious lines of emotion that seemed to belong to someone else.

  “You!” Jane said to Bran, pushing her hands fiercely into her pockets. “You, you think you’re so special, don’t you, with the white hair and the difference, and the eyes behind those silly glasses. Super-different. You can tell us what we ought to do, you think you’re even more special than Will. But who are you, anyway? We never met you at all until yesterday, in the middle of nowhere on a mountain, and why should we get into danger just because you—” Her voice quivered and dwindled, and she swung away from them, up the hill, towards Barney’s small eager vanishing form.

  Simon began to go after her and then paused, irresolute.

  “Special, is it?” Bran said softly as if to himself. “Special. That’s nice. After all the years of people sneering and muttering about the boy with no colour in his creepy skin. That’s lovely. Special. And what is this about the eyes?”

  “Yes,” Will said shortly. “Special. You know it.”

  Bran hesitated; he pulled off his glasses and stuffed them in his pocket. “That is separate. She knows nothing of that. And that is not at all what she meant.”

  “No,” Will said. “But you and I may not forget it for a moment. And you may not … let go, like that.”

  “I know,” Bran said. “I’m sorry.” He looked deliberately at Simon as he spoke, including him in the apology.

  Simon said awkwardly, “I don’t know what all this is about, but you shouldn’t be bothered by Jane flying off the handle. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Doesn’t seem like her,” Will said.

  “Well … now and then she does it, these days. A sort of flare-up … I think,” Simon said confidingly, “she’s going through a stage.”

  “Maybe,” Will said. He was looking at Bran. “Or maybe it is Jane we should be specially watching?”

  “Come on,” Bran said. He brushed raindrops from the brim of his cap. “Carn March Arthur.”

  They climbed on, to the line where the green grassy slope met a grey sky. On the downward sweep of the path on the other side, Jane and Barney were crouched beside a small outcropping of rock, identical with every other rocky scar on the hill but singled out by a neat slate marker like a label. Will came slowly down the path, his senses open and alert as the ears of a hunting dog, but he felt nothing. Glancing across, he saw the same blankness on Bran’s face.

  “There’s a sort of carved-out circle here that’s supposed to be where the hoof of Arthur’s horse trod—look, it’s marked.” Barney measured the hollow in the rock with his hand. “And another over there.” He sniffed, unimpressed. “Pretty small horse.”

  “They are hoof-shaped, though,” Jane said. Her head was down, her voice slightly husky. “I wonder what really made them?”

  “Erosion,” Simon said. “Water swirling round.”

  “With dirt rubbing,” Bran said.

  Jane said hesitantly, “And frost, cracking the rock.”

  “Or the hoof of a magic horse, coming down hard,” Barney said. He looked up at Will. “Only it wasn’t, was it?”

  “No,” Will said, smiling. “Hardly. If Arthur had ridden over every hollow called Arthur’s Hoofprint, or sat on every rock called Arthur’s Seat, or drunk from every spring called Arthur’s Well, he’d have spent his whole life travelling round Britain without a stop.”

  “And so would the knights,” Barney said cheerfully, “to sit round every hill called King Arthur’s Round Table.”

  “Yes,” Will said. He picked up a small white quartz pebble and rolled it round and round his palm. “Those too. Some of the names mean … other things.”

  Barney jumped up. “Where’s the lake, the one he’s supposed to have taken the monster from?”

  “Llyn Barfog,” Bran said. “The Bearded Lake. Over here.”

  He led them on, down the path into a hollow between hilltops, curving round a slope; the rain, which had been gentle, began here to whip at their faces in uneven gusts, as the high wind eddied round the gullied land. The cloud was low over their heads.

  “Such a funny name, the Bearded Lake,” Jane said. The words were aimed at Bran, though she walked without looking at him; Will felt a pang of compassion for her groping unspoken apology. “Bearded. Not exactly romantic.”

  “I’ll show you why in a minute,” Bran said without rancour. “Watch wh
ere you tread, now, there’s boggy patches.” He strode ahead of them all, dodging tussocks of reedy grass that marked wet ground. And then Will looked up, and suddenly there ahead of him through the driving rain he could see the far side of the Happy Valley again, misted and grey.

  But this time, on this side, on their own steep edge over-hanging the valley, there lay a lake.

  It was a strange small reed-edged lake, little larger than a pond; its dark surface seemed curiously patched and patterned. Then Will saw that its open surface was rippled by the wind, but that only a small part of it was open, a triangle at the closest end of the lake. All the rest of its surface, from the end at the edge of the valley to a trailing V-shape in the centre, was covered with the leaves and stems and creamy white bloom of waterlilies. And from a singing in his ears like the sudden rise of waves on a loud sea, he knew too that somewhere up here, after all, was the place to which they were intended to come. Something waited for them here, somewhere up on this rolling rock-strewn mountain top, between the Happy Valley and the estuary of the Dyfi River.

  Through a mist that was not the rain in the air but a blurring inside his mind, he saw with a vague distant surprise that this feeling did not seem to have come to Bran. The white-haired boy stood on the path with Simon and Jane, one hand raised over his eyes against the wind and rain, the other pointing.

  “The Bearded Lake—see, it’s the weed on the water that gives it the name. Some years when there is not much rain it gets much smaller, and the weed is left all around it like a beard. John Rowlands says perhaps the name is not from that, perhaps long ago there was much more water in the lake and it would spill out over the edge of the mountain and down into the valley in a waterfall. That could be, too. But a long time ago indeed, the way it looks now.”

  The little lake lay dark and silent under the shifting grey sky. They could hear the wind whining over the hills, and rustling through their clothes. Down in the valley, far away, a curlew gave its sad ghostly call. Then closer by, somewhere, they heard a muffled shout.

  Barney turned his head. “What’s that?”

  Bran looked across the lake at the slope that seemed to be the highest part of the mountain on which they stood. He sighed. “Visitors. Shouting for the echo. Come and see.”

  Will lagged behind as they balanced their way one after the other along the muddy, rock-strewn path edging the lake.

  He gazed out once more across the water, and its white-starred green carpet of weed, to the far shore where the land fell abruptly away into the valley. The rain blew back into his eyes, the mist whirled over the hills. But nothing came into his consciousness; nothing spoke to him. There was only the strong sense pulsing through his mind that they were in the presence of the High Magic, in some form he did not understand.

  So then Will followed the others, along the path and round the next high slope. He found them standing on a bluff overlooking a flat hollow in the hills perhaps fifty yards square, a space much like the one occupied by the Bearded Lake, but here holding only the bright patches of coarse reedy grass that warned of marsh. A man and woman wearing startling orange anoraks stood lower down the slope, with three children of assorted sizes roaming about them shouting across the flat green hollow. A steep cliff-like rock on the opposite side threw an echo back.

  “Hey! … Hey….”

  “Ooooo! … Ooooo….”

  “Baa baa black sheep! … black sheep … sheep….”

  “Hey fat face! … face … face….”

  Jane said, “If you listen carefully it’s really a double echo, the second very faint.”

  “Fat face!” shouted the most raucous of the children again, delighted with himself.

  Barney said in a clear precise voice, “Funny how people can never think of anything intelligent to shout to make an echo.”

  “It’s like never knowing what to say to find out if a microphone’s working,” Will said. “Testing testing, one two three.”

  “The English master at school has a very rude rhyme he uses for that,” Simon said.

  “You can’t shout rude rhymes for an echo,” Barney said coldly. “Echoes are special. People ought to … to sing to them.”

  “Sing!” said Jane. The small children were still screeching at the mountain; she looked at them with distaste.

  “Well, why not? Or do some Shakespeare. Simon was Prospero last term—why not a bit of that?”

  “Were you really?” Bran looked at Simon with new interest.

  “Only because I was the tallest,” Simon said depreciatingly. “And had the right kind of voice.”

  “Fat face!” shouted all the awful children together.

  “Oh really!” said Jane, losing patience. “What’s the matter with their stupid parents?” She swung round irritably, and walked a little way back down the slope. The wind seemed less gusty here, and the rain had calmed to a fine mist. Underbrush scratched at her ankles; the slope was thick with heather and low-growing bilberry bushes, studded here and there with tiny blue-black berries among the leaves.

  The others’ voices receded as she wandered away. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and hunched her shoulders as if to shake something from her back. Black dog on my shoulder, she thought wryly: it was the family term for a brief bad mood, generally her own these days. Yet somehow this time, Jane felt, there was more than a mood invading her mind; this was a strangeness she could not define, had never known before. A restlessness, a half-fearful anticipation of something part of her seemed to understand and part not…. Jane sighed. It was like being two people at once: living with someone without having the least idea what the other would do or feel next.

  A flash of orange caught her eye through a gap in the hilly skyline; the noisy family was leaving, the mother dragging one rebellious child crossly by the arm. They disappeared behind the slope, heading for the path. But Jane did not go back to the others; she wandered aimlessly still on her own, through the heather and the wet grass, until suddenly the wind was cold on her face again and she found she was back at the Bearded Lake. From behind, she heard a faint laugh and a call from Barney, and then the same call again: a summons for the echo. She stood looking bleakly out over the dark weed-shrouded water, at the distant valley beyond. The wind sang in her ears. The cloud of the heavy grey sky was so low now that it blew ragged over the hilltop in white tails and tatters of mist, whirling down to the lake, curling, blowing away into the valley. The whole world seemed grey, as if all colour had drained from the summer grass.

  In an eddy of the wind that brought a sudden stillness after it, Jane heard Simon’s voice faintly behind her, a sudden snatch of sound. “… thou earth, thou! Speak! …” And very faintly indeed, perhaps only in imagining, she heard the echo: “… speak … speak….”

  Then some words came in another voice, clear and strange and she knew that it was Bran calling in Welsh; and again the echo came faintly back, bringing the words to her again familiar even while meaningless.

  The wind flurried, the mist blew in a ragged shroud over the far side of the lake, hiding the Happy Valley. And on the echo of Bran’s call, as if following a cue, a third voice came singing, singing so high and sweet and unearthly that Jane stood without breathing, caught out of movement, feeling every stilled muscle and yet as totally transported as if she had no body at all. She knew it was Will; she could not remember if she had ever heard him sing before; she could not even think, or do anything but hear. The voice soared up on the wind, from behind the hill, distant but clear, in a strange lovely line of melody, and with it and behind it very faint in a following descant came the echo of the song, a ghostly second voice twining with the first.

  It was as if the mountains were singing.

  And as Jane gazed unseeing at the clouds blowing low over the lake, someone came.

  Somewhere in the shifting greyness, a patch of colour began faintly to glow, red and pink and blue merging into one another too fast for the eye to follow. Glimmering soft and warm
on the cold mountain, it held Jane’s gaze as hypnotically as a flame; then gradually it began to focus itself, and Jane blinked in disbelief as she realized that a form was taking shape around it. Not definite clear shape, but a suggestion, a hint of what might be seen with the right eyes….

  The brightness grew more intense until suddenly it was all contained in a glowing rose-coloured stone set into a ring, and the ring on the finger of a slender figure standing before her, leaning a little as if resting on a stick. There was at first such brightness around the figure that Jane could not look directly at it; instead her eyes flickered down to the ground on which it stood, only to realize with a shock that no ground was there. The figure was floating before her, an isolate fragment of whatever world lay there behind the greyness. It was the delicate form of an old lady, she saw now, wearing a long light-coloured robe; the face was fineboned, kindly yet arrogant, with clear blue eyes that shone strangely young in the old, old cobweb-lined face.

  Jane had forgotten the others, forgotten the mountain and the rain, forgotten everything but the face that watched her and now, gently, smiled. But still the old lady did not speak.

  Jane said huskily, “You are the Lady. Will’s Lady.”

  The Lady inclined her head, a slow graceful nod. “And since you can see that much, I may speak to you, Jane Drew. It was intended, from the beginning, that you should carry the last message.”

  “Message?” Jane’s voice came out in a whisper.

  “Some things there are that may be communicated only between like and like,” the sweet soft voice said from the mist. “It is the pattern of a child’s game of dominoes. For you and I are much the same, Jane, Jana, Juno, Jane, in clear ways that separate us from all others concerned in this quest. And you and Will are alike in your youth and your vigour, neither of which I share.”

  The voice grew fainter, as if with a great weariness; then rallied, and the light glowed more brightly from the rose-coloured ring on the Lady’s hand. She drew herself upright, and her robe shone clear white now, bright as a moon over the grey lake.

  “Jane,” she said.